Windows, Preferably free

  • erogenouswarzone@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    AutoHotKey AHK for short. Allows automation of nearly anything in Windows, and is better than most alternatives. The downside is it’s VBScript, which I believe is going he way of the dodo, and it has quite a few gotchyas.

    However, on day one you can start assigning keys and combos to do common tasks.

    Don’t like Caps Lock? Reassign it to open Chrome. Hate that you can’t lock the screen with your left hand? Make Win+S a command that locks the screen.

    It’s free, has a huge community, and is truly amazing.

    • chepox@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Try Power Toys. It’s made by Microsoft and the Power Toys community and it’s free. It has a module to rebind keys just like AHK and it works really well with no admin access. It has a bunch of other nifty tools. I love it.

      • Jayb151@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Agreed! I was trying to figure out how to remind the default screen shot button in flame shot, but it wouldn’t let me. I just used power toys to remap a different key melted to the print screen button. Works flawlessly.

      • erogenouswarzone@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Ever since that article about VSCode collecting data yesterday, I don’t think I’m going to be learning anything new from Microsoft.

        • Daeraxa@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Do people think they make vscode out of the goodness of their own hearts or something?

    • amio@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      It’s not VBScript, AHK is a whole separate thing. It’s similar in “philosophy” and syntax to some degree though.

    • benwubbleyou@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      If you use a Mac, Keyboard Maestro is similar with features and stuff. It just uses an interface similar to Automator.

    • dan@upvote.au
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      1 year ago

      The downside is it’s VBScript, which I believe is going he way of the dodo,

      VB will be around forever IMO. A similar variant (VBA) is in Microsoft Office and there’s so many macros (and people that rely on macros) out there that I don’t think Microsoft would ever dare to break them. It’s effectively a lighter-weight variant of VB6 that was released maybe 25 years ago now. VBA has only had fairly minimal changes since then, the obky manor change being the addition of 64-bit support.

    • homoludens@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      The fact that Windows needs an external program (with administrator access?) to remap hotkeys is completely bizarre to me.

      • amio@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Huh? A Windows environment, like e.g. Linux, has thousands of different potential sources where “hotkeys” might come from. Some are easy to remap, some aren’t. That is all down to how that particular application implemented that particular hotkey and its configurability. I know, I know, Windass Bad.

        • homoludens@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          What do you mean by “thousands of different sources”? Afaik the hotkeys for e.g. the desktop environment are managed by KDE (or whatever you’re using). When I wanted to stop Windows from inserting “µ” whenever I pressed “Ctrl+M” I had to do some serious AHK trickery.